About Drill

Drill is an Apache open-source SQL query engine for Big Data exploration. Drill is designed from the ground up to support high-performance analysis on the semi-structured and rapidly evolving data coming from modern Big Data applications, while still providing the familiarity and ecosystem of ANSI SQL, the industry-standard query language. Drill provides plug-and-play integration with existing Apache Hive and Apache HBase deployments. A few of the many features offered by Drill include:

Low-latency SQL queries

Dynamic queries on self-describing data in files (such as JSON, Parquet, text) and MapR-DB/HBase tables, without requiring metadata definitions in the Hive metastore.

ANSI SQL

Nested data support

Integration with Apache Hive (queries on Hive tables and views, support for all Hive file formats and Hive UDFs)

BI/SQL tool integration using standard JDBC/ODBC drivers

MapR Sandbox with Drill

MapR includes Drill as part of the Hadoop distribution. The MapR Sandbox with Drill is a fully functional single-node cluster that simulates Drill in a Hadoop environment. Business and technical analysts, product managers, and developers can use the sandbox environment to get a feel for the power and capabilities of Drill by performing various types of queries. Once you get a flavor for the technology, refer to the Drill web site and Drill documentation for more details.

Note that Hadoop is not a prerequisite for Drill and users can start ramping up with Drill by running SQL queries directly on the local file system. Refer to Drill in 10 minutes for an introduction to using Drill in local (embedded) mode.